This is my rig: ExtremeTech’s Sal Cangeloso

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Having built my previous desktop in October 2008, I’ve been long overdue for a new system. I had delayed the build a number of times, usually waiting for the next cool thing in the pipeline — an occupational hazard when you look at technology news all day long — but with the release of Intel’s Ivy Bridge and Microsoft’s Windows 8, it was clearly time to put together my next PC.

This article will walk through the parts I bought and include some explanation of why I chose each of them. It’s not a buying guide or set of recommendations; it’s just a list of the components that made sense for me.

When choosing components my main considerations were stability, quietness, performance, and cost, in that order. The build wasn’t particularly price sensitive. My goal was to keep the investment at a reasonable level, while bearing in mind that my previous rig lasted four years so any expenses should amortize over time and seem relatively minor.

CPU: Intel Core i7-3770S

When I decided to put together a new machine, it was pretty obvious to me that I was going to go with the latest (but not quite the greatest) from Intel. I considered the Core i7-3770K, which has been the most popular choice for enthusiasts as it’s unlocked and top-shelf, and the $200 Core i5-3570K which offers a lot of bang-for-the-buck. Ultimately I went with the 3770S, the 65W TDP version of the quad-core 3770 chip. It runs at lower base frequency (3.1GHz) than the K but has the same Turbo frequency (3.9GHz). I don’t suspect that the power consumption or heat production differences will be significant but I won’t ever be overclocking the system so I saved some money (OK, just $15, but still) and kept heat and power usage to a minimum.

I’ve been using stock CPU coolers for some time, based on the assumption that the amount of engineering Intel can put into them is much more than what a smaller firm could afford. Even so, after getting numerous recommendations about it, I went with the Noctua NH-D14. This gargantuan set of fins and heatpipes has 120mm and 140mm fans but remains near-silent. While it’s certainly impressive, the cooler’s huge size means working inside the case can be a pain once it’s in place, so make sure your memory and any hard-to-reach connectors are installed before the D14 (unless you have exceedingly tiny hands). I doubt I’ll go with something this large again, but I couldn’t resist the lure of customizable quiet cooling.

Motherboard: Intel DZ77BH-55K

Today, many aspects of PC building are easier than ever. Unfortunately this doesn’t hold true for picking a motherboard. Every manufacturer releases a number of models running a given chipset, and the differences between them are nearly impossible to discern. This is especially true when the model names are nonsensical jumbles like “AGA-Z77X-UD3H.” (End of rant.)

With maximum stability in mind I went with an Intel motherboard, as I usually do. The DZ77BH-55K offers up the features I wanted and, at $170, the price isn’t that bad either. Intel’s Z77 motherboards range from $120 to $270, so this one seemed like a great choice (though the top model does have Intel’s trademark skull logo on it).

Graphics: EVGA GeForce GTX 660

While I was tempted to invest heavily in graphics, I realized that for some time now I’ve been getting by on an ATI Radeon 4670, so ultimately I didn’t feel compelled to overspend. I wanted to go with Nvidia, despite generally being an ATI/AMD guy, and the GTX 660 has gotten high marks across the board. The GTX 660 fit my price range and came with a sweet $20 mail-in-rebate. I had been recommended against getting anything that used the stock Nvidia cooler, so the EVGA fit the bill.

Storage: Intel 335 SSD 240GB

I’ve been using Intel SSDs for a couple of years now and I’ve had good results. With the 20nm 335 just released, this seemed like a perfect option — the performance difference between this and the next model up (the 500 series) seems negligible for my needs and a price of $199 for a 240GB SSD put it well under the $1/GB mark. For a moment I was skeptical about the drive due to a possible longevity issue identified by Anandtech, but it seemed unlikely that it identified a systemic problem so I bought it anyway. A recent post confirmed that this was a non-issue (at least for me).

For mass storage I took the 2TB Western Digital drive that I was running in an external eSATA enclosure and put it in the case. It’s nothing special, but I need something large for my photos and video. I also dropped an old Kingston 60GB SSDNow in the case, which I’ll use for extra storage and doing thankless tasks like housing virtual machines and acting as a scratch disk.

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Debaditya Chatterjee

what about the os?
if u want the latest & greatest, then its windows 8 pro 64bit. but since u use it for serious work as well, your best bet would be windows 7 ultimate 64bit & windows 8 pro 64bit in a dual boot config. u cud use the 2 ssds u mentioned, or partition the 1st one into 2, & still use the 2nd one for VMs & as a scratch disk. thats wat i’ve got, win7 ultimate 64bit & windows 8 release preview in dualboot.

http://geek.com/ sal cangeloso

Win 7 ultimate 64. I’m mulling over the upgrade to Windows 8, but I’m having trouble pulling the trigger. Then I run ubuntu in virtual machines.

Dual boot is a good solution for some people (especially with multiple SSDs), but it don’t want to deal with the extra management. Especially since I don’t *need* windows 8 for anything side from testing.

Neon Frank

That’s just it, no one really “needs” Win 8.

Yes, Win 8 boots faster buts who’s that impatient to wait for for 15 seconds or so? Performance boost over Win 7 is minimal so what do people need Win 8 for really? A flashy new GUI so alien to Windows users they might as well be using a Mac?

I’m curious to what Win 8 sp1 will change ;)

Jerry

The nerd in me had to get Windows 8 for it’s under the hood improvements, the finished kernal rewrite just feels *sexy* :P

The real benefit is the network sharing, compared to windows 7 “it just works” when you have a bunch of network shares over multiple devices, especially the xbox!

The designer in me hates a few elements, but that’s the same with any OS.

Debaditya Chatterjee

is there really a noticeable difference in boot-times of windows 7 & 8 on identical, healthy SSDs??

I thought about 32GB of RAM, but didn’t seem like I would be able to take advantage or it very often. Also RAM with heatsinks like that would not fit under my CPU cooler – you have to be careful if you go with the Noctua.

http://www.facebook.com/people/Jim-Phong/100001178973449 Jim Phong

I prefer Arctic Cooling products, better cleaner and smaller design on most of their products. Right now their Freezer i30 is the one I would get on Intel CPUs or the Freezer A30 for AMD ones.
Their previous Freezer XTREME Rev. 2 is still a very good product I installed on various machines but it was bigger in size.

They released a new Freezer i30 CO (Continous Operation) but if their noise data specifications are correct it’s just too noisy and if that is the case I see no reason to get it over the plain Freezer i30 which is very quiet. Both models dissipate up to 320Watt.

Robin

I agree sandybridge is actually faster than ivy bridge with twice the memory bandwidth and more cpu cores. The only downside is it only supports pcie 2.0. Still no video cards make good use of this yet with even the gtx690 only just saturating a pcie 2.0 16 slot.

For raw performance sandybridge beats ivy bridge for now.

Basil_Nolan

Thanks for the article. You gave me some good ideas on what to choose for my next rig (long overdue too). Personally, I’ve been waiting for Valve to announce Half Life 3 to empty my wallet and aim for a power rig. But that is unlikely.

As an enthusiast, I know I don’t have to throw away a lot of money to ensure a nice digital bulldozer. The components you choose provide me good insight in what I’m looking for. Well done!

http://geek.com/ sal cangeloso

Thanks!

HL3 is a tough game to tag your new PC to. Not as bad as Duke Nukem Forever, but you might be waiting for awhile. I was waiting for Ivy Bridge, but I at least a few people waiting for Haswell until they build their next system.

GatzLoc

for $1500 wow you could have done better tho. Idk how much you spent but I would have just gotten a 2500k or something a 7970, and a raven 3 while just going with a gold rated psu. For coolers under air the dif. is usually not more than 5-10c delta t at max fans and the noctua only wins due to being able to use 3.

The hyper 212+ is, and has been for some time the best air cooler bar none when you consider it’s price of $20. If you want to go any further than the hyper 212+ you’re looking at 80+ air coolers and with that I’d just take the 80 and start looking into a water loop but you already knew that.

You did your research so Idk I’d def look into the silverstone raven line of cases though the only design issue is that if you put a rad on top you can’t close the door.

Is z77 esp. for $170 really worth it? You could have gotten a gigabyte p67 ud4 for less and had a more solid mobo. Asus has been so-so for me seems to much of a works or doesn’t company.

Jerry

While I love my Raven 2 and it’s 90 degree spin it’s a huuuge case. It was my first quality case as before that I would always go with a cheap $20 beige case.

To be honest, if something happens to this case I’ll be the first to go back to another cheapie $20 one. All said and done, it stays out of sight and cooling really isn’t a problem since I’ve never kept components long enough for them to die.

Just my story ;)

Kira

This guy is an Intel Fanboy!

Neon Frank

He did say he’s not over-clocking so why get a motherboard with features he won’t use?

Xplorer4x4

Why not? If a comparable quality mobo can be had for the same price or cheaper Not saying Intel boards are bad. There not, or at least they weren’t the last time I checked, but since when are more features for your back a bad thing? Sure he may not plan to OC, but perhaps something will change that down the road. Never hurts to be prepared.

http://twitter.com/1972AJM Eric Wright

Additionally, some of Intel’s past motherboards perform sub-standard or just hang.

Having worked in a computer repair shop, and in the broadcast industry (both radio and television) for two decades, I can tell you Intel’s motherboards are in general better than most Asrock boards, but not up at the top in reliability compared to the likes of DFI, MSI, or even Gigabyte..

Their CPU’s, however, are the best in the consumer market, and have been for decades. (best being a generalization including speed, reliability, and other factors combined)

The jury is still out on the selected SSD… given the season of giving is upon us, it’s entirely possible there was no firmware SNAFU,, could be assurances are to drive sales of a product with a possible shortened lifespan. Later a new model could be released with better binned parts and better reliability.

Remember IBM’s Deathstar HDD’s? Companies do sell products with flaws and insist there’s no problem… it does happen.

Still, the article/review is nice, and informative, and well timed for this holiday shopping season.

Let’s hope this system lasts as long as you’d like.

Then again, I’d still like to know when anyone builds a SSD that can handle 24/7 torrent upload and download (yes, I realize the upload side poses no issue) on a family oriented machine. These days more and more files are available as legal torrents, and not just the OS ISO images.

I’d like to know how such a drive would last in a system handling 4 large torrents per day with gigabit fiber connectivity, even with a rather large 32MB buffered write cache…

I’ll bet it’s not 5 years.

http://www.mrseb.co.uk/ Sebastian Anthony

Or, you know, you could always torrent to a larger, bulk data/storage hard drive.

Xplorer4x4

Re: Intel boards: I am going to agree here. I haven’t ever really heard of Intel boards being bad, and I know my cousin who owned a PC repair shop and did a lot of enterprise instillations relied heavily on Intel mobos with good success. I will also agree with Asrock and throw ASUS under the bus as well. I personally have had bad luck with ASUS Mobo’s and do nto plan to go ASUS any time soon. As much as I hate to say it, I am starting to question MSI as well. I have used a few MSI boards over the past few upgrades, and had good luck until my latest MSI purchase in January. It took three or four RMAs in a row for defective boards. It also showed me that Newegg has become to big for their own good as customer service has deteriorated by leaps and bounds since a few years ago.

Re: Intel CPUS: You say they have lead the industry for decades? Now I admit I haven’t followed the industry for decades, rather about a decade, but I think your stretching this a bit. I think most would say AMD reigned supreme for the majority of the 90s, where Intel has ruled for the past decade, maybe a little more but decades is really pushing it imo.

Re Intel SSDs: I don’t see intel making any major changes in terms of controller and flash brands for awhile unless some one takes the market by storm. Since Intel went to Sandforce, the Intel line up has seen a spike in failure rates I believe, but at the same time, looking at the competitors using Sandforce Intel has a dramatically smaller number of failure rates.

Re:Longevity of SSDs: I can tell you for a fact that the longevity is not as bad as what it has been made out to be, at least in regards to say an Intel X25-M G2. I have put mine through quite a bit of abuse, not to the extent your talking about but previously did a lot of encoding and other disk intensive processes on the, and over the course of about 5 years, roughly, they have seen a less then 10% decrease in estimated life span.

http://geek.com/ sal cangeloso

Might come off like that, but I’ve always had good luck with their stuff. I mean, Intel CPU was a no-brainer, the Intel SSD seemed like a good buy (though I strongly considered Samsung), and the Intel motherboard seemed solid plus I didn’t want to deal with Asus’ massive lineup. Plus I just got 4 years out of an Intel motherboard, why rock the boat?!

some_guy_said

Hey sal, I think we went in with very similar mindsets – you mentioned many of the components that went into my 3 mo old build.

I have the i5 3750k, the gigabyte ud3h, 650 watt psu, etc.

I went with a 128GB Corsair mlc SSD for the high throughput that could utilize the SATA3, a 2GB gtx 680, and only 8 GB of RAM.

And I’ll point something out – I rarely use more than 25% of my cpu or motherboard ram, and almost never peak over 50% – So when you’re in this range, I think it is definitely important to weight your investment on the video card – It is probably the only component that will get out of date over the computer’s lifetime. My last setup had an old core duo, and it still chugged along pretty well.

http://geek.com/ sal cangeloso

Thanks. I definitely think we’re on the same page here. And yes, you’re right to invest more in the GPU than the CPU.

The two things I will say about spending a lot on video cards are: 1) i don’t mind gaming in windowed mode. So as the system gets older it doesn’t bother me too much to scale down a little. I’m just easy going like that, even if i do miss out on some cool textures or shadow effects

2) The video card is just about the easiest part of your computer to upgrade. So a $200 card now and a $200 card in 18 months, will make more sense for many people than a $400-500 card now. This is especially true if you are concerned with power consumption, volume, and size of the high end stuff.

some_guy_said

1) I hate gaming in windowed mode. The textures and special effects and anti-aliasing, etc I don’t care as much about, but if it is windowed, I’m pretty unhappy. Just my preference.

2) I disagree that your second point is a good reason to buy a lesser vid card. If You buy a $200 card now, and another $200 card in 18 months…you’ve spent almost as much as I have, for inferior graphics for 18 months.

I was looking at the gtx 670/680 specifically because I wanted to keep the power envelope down, but when it comes down to it, a few tens of watts doesn’t make much difference unless you are sitting around your PSU limit. And in the end, it was so close, I just went ahead and got a 650Watt power supply anyways.

The HD4000 Integrated graphics on my processor was more than enough for regular surfing, light gaming, and basic tasks. I held off on buying a graphics card altogether (for 3 months), because I had no compelling reason to buy a graphics card – Which changed once I entered the MWO beta.

So, the only reason to get a mid range card is because you just don’t have the money for it – But let’s face it – If you don’t have the money, you could get a powerful pre-packaged system for less than you could build it for.

http://twitter.com/1972AJM Eric Wright

This just in, thoughts of the paranoid:

What if Intel is just claiming the drive is going to last longer than indicated to encourage sales, and not because it will last longer? (Christmas shopping season is not the time to admit to shortened lifespans for a new product)

Some would say Intel wouldn’t do anything to hurt their reputation, but business is business – and they can always claim an error at a later date and just release a new model after issues have been solved with a future version…

Is that paranoid enough for anyone?

Happy Holidays..

michael westen

Even a hardware editor that dose not know how almost utterly useless TDP is for end consumers!

S and T models are a very smart marketing trick, to let costumers pay more for less!

You can do the same thing by going in to your bios (or use Windows software) and under-clock your CPU, with in 2min or so…..

First, if your not stress your CPU at 100%, with things like video encoding or F@H, then power usage is about the same between a 3770 and a 3770S.

I my self have a server, and i rip/download BR movies, en re-encode them my self with heavy calculations so i have maximum compression with no visible detail loss.

(+/- 2GB for a 90min movie and about 10 hours encoding time)

I use there for my server that got in it a i7 2600K that i have onder-clocked to 1.9GHz ware i have about the best IPW (Instructions Per Watt), but if i need more speed, like when i download all 22 James Bond BR films, i set the clock to 4.5GHz and cut my encoding time by 60%, bringing it down from 310 hours to 125.

If i would have had a S model i could never be that flexible even compared to a standard 2600.

Next you use a Intel mobo????, Why ????
Yeah they solid motherboard, but they lack a lot in the small gems that ASUS has, like fully controllable fan-controller were you can make fan speed profiles, and lots of other goodies that intel just not bothers them self with.

Storage: Intel 335 SSD 240GB ???
Ware the Samsung 830 is just as fast but with a proven reliable track record, ware the 20nm NAND still have to prove it self.

(same reason i would not get a Samsung 840)

Its your PC but i have some serious questions about some of your picks and the reasons for it, but hey thats just my opnion.

http://geek.com/ sal cangeloso

I appreciate the feedback though and I think most of the stuff you said it right, it just doesn’t apply to me. fwiw – I answered almost every question you asked in the post.

fish

I dont understand why you buy a 65 w cpu then buy a huge twin fan heatsink? surely any aftermarket one with low noise would do and for less wonga.

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